Sunday, June 12, 2016

I feel like I've watched an inordinate amount of horror movies about people being starved. Is it a more common thread in horror than I realized? Off the top of my head, I remember Hunger, Feed, Ravenous, and Dread. These movies are not about food deprivation as a portion of overall torture or imprisonment, but the basis of the entire movie (a little less so in Dread, but that was the sequence that got me the most)

So now we have Starve, with a middle of the road rating, and filmed right here in the good ol' US of A. We got ourselves a group of hipsters, Candice, Beck, and Jiminey, traveling to the boondocks to look for an urban legend of feral children living in sinkholes. In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque roadside store, the proprietors warn them not to go into any houses and to stay away from the old high school. While I'm sure these poor suckers would have TRIED to stay away from the high school, we all knew that wasn't in the cards after that oddly specific warning.

So, the "zookeepers" as they're called, are keeping a menagerie of humans that they starve, then force to kill another person in order to eat. It's a fight in the sense that someone gets a machete and someone gets a length of rope. This continues so on and so forth, with new victims brought in, and the longtime residents being thrown in the mix. Candice and Beck, joining forces, present a challenge to the Principal.

So there was something I really liked about this movie. The premise was similar to Hunger, pitting people against each other in a time of starvation. The backstory of the captors was actually similar as well, but I wish it would have gotten a little deeper into that. We were left until the very end learning motivations, and then it was just a little too late. But overall I liked this, and I think it deserves a little more than the mediocre rating it's getting. Check it out on Amazon Prime streaming.